Architects and critics bristle at DS+R's Folk Museum sacrifice

Yesterday, DS+R announced in their proposal for MoMA's redesign that the American Folk Art Museum would have to be demolished. Backlash from the #folkMoMA community quickly arose: architects and critics called the choice callous and unsustainable, outraged not only by the Folk Art Museum's destruction but also the design that would take its place, and its impact on New York's (and DS+R's) reputation.

We've gathered a slew of responses to the proposal, both indignant and accepting, from Archinect contributors and beyond, and will be following developments closely. Here are a few of those thoughts:

Darkman: "This solidifies Rem Koolhaas as the best architect-thinker of our time, for his original MoMA proposal, "MoMA, Inc." "

thebeigecity: "As for the Folk Art Museum - it was cramped and cloying, overly sentimental and specialized. Yes, the new addition is boring but its by DS+R so there will be some LED lights or video screens or transgressive performance space or single surfaces or bad formalism or some other techy knick knacks tacked on - don't worry, it will all be ok and nothing more."

jla-x: "The grime was NY. It was its character. The folk art building had some of that brutalness that was fitting. The dsr project is sterile. Generally speaking, Ny is a sad sterile shell of what it once was. Its a plastic surgery victim that removed her charming idiosyncratic features to achieve some phony image of perfection and ended up losing her unique beauty and looking like all the other plastic people."

Other news publications:

Jerry Saltz for Vulture: "Somewhere inside me, I heard myself saying my good-byes to MoMA. I thought, I have seen the best modern museum of my generation destroyed by madness... From the days both the new MoMA and the American Folk Art Museum opened, it was clear to almost all in the art world that they were tragic failures in terms of their primary missions. Now those disasters are joined forever."

Justin Davidson for Vulture: "But that hesitancy shows in the provisional design for the next phase. The client is bent on art-world domination; the architects seem halfhearted. Instead of healing the scar left by the Folk Art Museum, they have left a gleaming gap."

John Hill for Archidose: "Ultimately the Williams Tsien design was too small and inflexible (like I said, not a surprising move) to work for MoMA, regardless of Diller's specious words about integrity. As sustainability and the need to preserve buildings increases, so does the need to be creative about how buildings are reused. In this case the creativity is nowhere to be seen."

Statement from the Folk Art Museum's architects, Williams and Tsien, via the architects' website: "We have learned of MoMA’s final decision to raze the former American Folk Art Museum building and replace it with a new structure. This action represents a missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many.

The Folk Art building was designed to respond to the fabric of the neighborhood and create a building that felt both appropriate and yet also extraordinary. Demolishing this human‐scaled, uniquely crafted building is a loss to the city of New York in terms of respecting the size, diversity and texture of buildings in a midtown neighborhood that is at risk of becoming increasingly homogenized.

This is a building that we and others teach from and about. It has served as an invaluable learning resource for students, colleagues and scholars, and a source of inspiration for many more. It has a powerful architectural legacy. The inability to experience the building firsthand and to appreciate its meaning from an historical perspective will be profoundly felt.
As architects, we must be optimists. So we look to the future and we move on."

Paul Goldberger for Vanity Fair: "So why not let the matter go? Not every preservation battle is won, and the museum and its architects have produced a long list of rational reasons why they don’t feel that saving this particular building is practical. But as art isn’t always a rational matter, sometimes architecture isn’t, either. The brooding, somber façade of the folk-art museum, made of folded planes of hammered bronze, combines monumental dignity with the image of delicate handcrafting, and it is a majestic, if physically small, architectural achievement. A city that allows such a work to disappear after barely a dozen years is a city with a flawed architectural heart. A large cultural institution that cannot find a suitable use for such a building is an institution with a flawed architectural imagination.

The Williams and Tsien building is also the last remnant of something approaching reasonable scale on West 53rd Street, a block that seems ever bigger, ever more corporate, ever less diverse. Tearing down the folk-art museum may make sense by MoMA’s measure of things, but it is hard to see how it makes New York a better place. "

Robin Pogrebin for the New York TImes:
"Despite the plan’s broad scope, the museum said it could not yet provide a budget, making the viability of the redesign hard to measure.
MoMA officials said they would need to raise all the money privately because the museum is not a city-owned institution. “This is now a much bigger project than we had envisioned,” Mr. Lowry said. “We have to figure out how to cost it out.”

Via Twitter:

Alexandra Lange (architecture and design critic) @LangeAlexandra: "I thought museums had woken up from the bigger-and-bigger dream. Not in NYC."

AlJavieera Tropics (geographer and adjunct professor) @AlJavieera: "MoMA needs to demolish a building to create seamless entry for luxury condo tower into the museum."

Mimi Zeiger (journalist and critic) @loudpaper: "MoMA will survive the #FolkMoma fiasco, but will DS+R?"

Christopher Hawthorne (architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times) @HawthorneLAT: "This should be good: shortlist for new Vancouver Art Gallery includes both antagonists in #FolkMoMA fight: DS+R and Williams/Tsien."

Michael Kimmelman (architecture critic for the New York Times) @kimmelman: "If MoMA had treated Folk as architecturally worthy, like objects in its collection, the question of demolition couldn't have arisen."

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66 Comments

I discovered an unintentional irony yesterday. I visited MoMA's website and the first image that appeared was a model of Tatlin's Tower. The unrealized structure's model protected by security guards, cameras and a velvet rope. How these steward's of modern art and design could even consider demolishing this jewel of a building is beyond me. So, the floor plates don't line up. How much difference is there? The difference can't be made up with, say a ramp?, Architects know how to design ramps. It's on the A.R.E. Perhaps the walls next to the ramps could even display art, like say the Guggenheim?. Or perhaps the interconnection is an undefined area where "things" can happen, like say , repose or gathering or...Perhaps the museum could use an actual example of great architectural design to, oh I don't know, exhibit their architecture, design and craft collection??? What it all tells me is they want this building gone so they can create a seemless money maker with an eigty story condo on top. Maybe the permits can be expedited quickly so the demolition can start in time for the upcoming Corbu show. What a fucking joke.

It does hurt, HotelSphinx. It's a physical ache in my body right now that I've been feeling more and less strongly in waves over the last 27 hours since I heard this news. The people around me are alarmed by how distraught I am, but it's because it HURTS. This is what heartbreak feels like.

It's also worse now because it's DSR. Lowry and the Board of MOMA are untouchable elites, so the anger in April when the news first broke felt somewhat taergetless: the huge corporate board was the enemy. But now it hurts even more because it feels like betrayal by one of our own: DSR, who made (as you say, Sphinx) a building out of fog.

Culture production invented art consumption as recreational activity and entertainment for the masses which needs a corporate harness for its cash value. I can just hear the dirty boardroom talks and jokes about architects behind the scenes by the powerful. It is sad that public has very little to say anything that matters about any of this but just consume what is put in front of them. Architects are somewhere in between as the facilitators. DSR, FOG, ABc, SOM, DCA, F.U.C.K, SUCK etc..

With each passing day, commercial success is determining look, longevity and renewal of the cities, buildings, people and art. Making many things monotonous, boring and shallow. I think other than being an architect with certain passion for buildings and values for significant ones, this is what makes Donna Sink and a lot of us architects upset. Looks like as a society we have reached to a point that nothing matters and we fail to care about whatever the public powers we have are taken away from us day by day and consistently. People are not allowed to like anything if it is not benefiting the big guys' calcs.

Brace yourselves and eat commercial art. This is still the antipasti. Buon appetito.

"Culture production invented art consumption as recreational activity and entertainment for the masses which needs a corporate harness for its cash value"

Ahh, the good old days when culture was all about the love... Money has always been a part of culture. Incase you've forgot our western history, it's the merchant princes of Northern Italy that began the democratization of western society that led to the delegitimizing of Kings and Queens with, what else, money. Time tends to diminish the role of the "dirty" money behind many of the monuments we revear today. Not to acknowledge from the start is both naive and irresponsible.

"People are not allowed to like anything if it is not benefiting the big guys' calcs."

When modernism was 'bought' by corporations in the 1950's and tore down huge swaths of New York, architects didn't say boo becasue they bought into all that bullshit about tearing down the old and obsolete, the same old and obsolete that goes for extreme money today now that it's a bit precious. Don't get me wrong, it sucks that they are tearing down this beloved landmark for something bigger (and more corporate), but welcome to New York, founded as a trading post in 1624 by the Dutch West India Company. Maybe it's time to revise the history books.

Prego!

Jan 10, 14 9:06 am

Reading between the lines, it'll be very interesting to see what happens to both DillerScofidyo and WilliamsTsien firms after this fiasco in the next few years.

It's well known how the elites work and the Folk Museum demolition is really an example of "casting couch architecture". The directors have clearly propositioned DSR. Do the dirty deed now & their will be lucrative future projects. Maybe DSR is rewarded with sweet corportate commissions (thus sending thiem into the pantheon of secure corporate sellouts like SoM or Norma Jean Foster). Or mabye DSR bristles and quickly gets left to the wayside.

Also keep an eye on WilliamsTsien. They might e the real story here. By sacrificing a child (the folk museum), they might end up with the real rewards. Cushy commissions and a fast track to the Pritzker prizes. In fact, given the mere 15 year time frame of the Folk Art museum, it's not impossible that the fix was in all along.

Unfortunatly, this happens everyday in America. In Europe, I feel like this kind of cultural pilaging would be considered crazy. Maybe if we stopped this bs infighting between traditional and modernist camps, we could all recognize that it's all of our heritage that's getting lost.

Here's the site where I learned of this imminent disaster. Hope it can help in the Folk case.

This reminds me of St. Vincent's hospital. Another "weird" building that made NYC cool--it was loved because it was everything the city used to be. You could see things that you couldn't see anywhere else.

Now we get "art-bay" which will house future Lady Gaga-Jay Z performances.

With respect to the brewery in Memphis, there are buildings that deserve to be preserved all over the place, around the world (and in other galaxies perhaps). The reason that this particular debate is noticed is because it allows the design community to focus its energies on one particular, gross symbol of a certain kind of architecture under threat--in this case a modern building that is not white and glass cubes, but something more humane. One that didn't even have life beyond 12 years. Something undervalued in the design media.

I know that everybody has their own buildings under threat in this and that town. Maybe there will be increased support to save them, or maybe not. It's up to local communities to show their voice. But if the community cannot save the Folk Art Museum from the MoMA, then it probably won't be able to save much of anything anywhere.

I'm possibly going to be involved in knocking down a building soon. It's old-ish, but not significant. And while it's likely better-built than most contemporary similar buildings are, it's very typical construction of many decades ago - so it has some nice craftsmanship, but not anything outrageously special.

FAM *is* outrageously special. Way more so than the Portland Building, whose loss I'm already mourning.

Thayer, I totally agree with you. I like to sometimes Look at things from a future perspective-imagining that I'm living in the year 2500 or something. How will people view this in the future? I think its pretty clear that they will look at this alongside the ruins of our shitty Styrofoam strip malls, our inhumane suburbs, our soulless corporate towers and be puzzled as to why we would tear down one of the few significant structures of our time. From a future perspective, this makes me even more sad, because with time, the architecturally significant structures of the present may/will become the historically significant landmarks of the future. Such landmarks transcend their initial function and their value becomes intrinsic to their very existence as part of our cultural identity "memory". The Pyramids, the Pantheon, the Alhambra, etc. In other words, the shortcomings in the utilitarian function of the FAM are truly secondary from a long term perspective. We are basically erasing our "heritage" before it even exists. We are destroying things that could (and probably would) someday be of great importance to a much wider segment of society than just us architects and artists.

We should send DSR a copy of Aldo Rossi's "Architecture of the City." Seems like this book is of great importance with regard to this debate.

Albatross. Around the neck of DS-R^2. As I've said elsewhere, DS+R got snookered by their own arrogance, MoMa never intended to keep Folk, never, anyone believing anything to the contrary is also believing that Cooper Union has Peter Cooper's legacy in mind, when they decided to go down the route of charging tuition. Both these issues have signaled the final coup de grace for NYC as place for art and the creative culture. It has succumbed to the slow, achingly slow, carbon monoxide death of corporate greed and the moneyed, monkey class of idiots that line Park Avenue.

I'm reminded of the film Basquiat;

Cynthia Kruger: I just don't know if I can live with the green.

Basquiat: You want me to make it a nice shit brown?

MoMA just couldn't live with the bronze plates, so DS+R made it a "nice shit brown."

All anyone needs, to actually see the truth, is to find the glasses that Roddy Piper was wearing in "They Live" to see these people for what they are.

Jerry not unintelligent, but I don't understand his constant claim that FAM wasn't acceptable as a place to show art. PS-1, which he references in this letter, is an acceptable place to show art, as are hundreds of other small, oddly-shaped, challenging places. Storefront, for example. And Cincinnati's CAC. I saw some of the best work I've seen in *my* city at Spacecamp Microgallery, a triangular-ish leftover space of about 100sf in the Murphy Art Center.

If you think that the only way to exhibit/view art is in an expansive plain white box, you're still living in the mid-20th Century.

Jan 13, 14 8:57 am

"If MoMA asked you to rape a small girl for the commission would you do that to?"

Well, duh, yes. Cause the abuse, rape, & torture of children is just how this elitist shits roll. Assuming I actually was shallow enough to want to work for them & their anti-human agenda, then yeah, I d think nothing of selling out my soul.

A fascinating letter, that raises the question, "Should modern art be displayed in modern architecture?" What DSR is trying to do is decidedly unmodern in how it is opening up to the street and blurring the lines between interior and urban (very different than inside and outside, a more modern conceit). With Saltz's advocacy for demolishing the FAM and the creation of a more introspective museum experience, he is looking for a return to Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, and the host of other great modern architects who designed boxes for modern art. As he eloquently summarizes, performance art, lectures, and installations are not painting, sculpture, drawing, or photography. Ultimately, I think the fundamental question for all, from the MoMA board to the museum visitor, is, "Should MoMA be housed in a building of our time or in a building that reflects the modern experience, a period that is quickly receding into history?"

In a way, this MoMA plan fits the current time perfectly: no longer interested in physical objects and their transformative experience, but rather in "art-bay" a gimmick black hole where people will come to see Tilda Swinton in a box, or whatever amusement spectacle that you will be able to see from the street. Marketing concepts like "flow" over curatorial substance.

Thanks Nam, I thought the color of the panels was familiar. It's interesting that all the focus, including the photos of this article tend to focus on the facade, a hand crafted natural material, not what you'd expect from the die-hards. Possibly a sub-concious rejection of the ubiquitous slicky parametric grids. Has there been any consideration given to doing a facodomy here? I know that would fly in the face of all the Moma used to stand for, as if, but it does seem to be the most loved part of the building.

@Thayer-D there was some discussion on Twitter re: a facodomy... Plus in above Kimmelman piece posted by Amelia he writes;

Might the new city administration have any excuse or inclination to weigh in on the demolition and new MoMA plan? Once upon a time, there was talk about at least saving the facade of the folk art building, a token to posterity. Ms. Diller dismissed the idea. “Facadism,” she called it. Fair enough. But Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien affixed a panel inscribed with the names of all the workers who helped build the American Folk Art Museum.

The panel with the names probably should be saved. But as I've said elsewhere, maybe even here, displaying those panels anywhere else is like putting the heads of your slain enemies on pikes at the city gates. It's barbaric. My preference would be, if it *has* to be destroyed (which it doesn't have to be), that the whole building from panels to handrails just disappear - vaporized. A complete loss. Nothing but photographs - it seems much more respectful, IMO, then scattering the skeleton all over creation.

Jan 14, 14 11:57 am

But heads on pikes are awesome!

Remarkably, the options that come up on an image serarch were fakes or pretty tame.

I would say that since the ice caps are melting we should try to salvage the materials and stop being such a throw away culture. Rather than scattering the remains, It would be interesting to reassemble the parts into something new...a sort of "exploded museum." Possibly, the FAM could become some type of public art piece. Separate the parts with space and allow nature to creep in... Maybe a type of publc art museum/pavilion left for the people to use in an informal way...Displaying art without any curatorial authority. An experiment by and for the public. The systems can be removed and the skeleton of the building can be reassembled as a ruin of its previous self without compromising its logic...A public open air structure or some sort in a park...

Donna, do you realize how much of your take on this whole bulding demolition situation relies on a demonization of everything you're opposed to? It's an unsophisticated form of critique, and garners no empathy from me.

If anything is like "putting the heads of your slain enemies on pikes at the city gates" it's saving the panel with names while insisting that no part of the rest of the building ever be saved. It wouldn't surprise me if the "barbarians" also often relied on an 'all or nothing' frame of mind.

Kimmelman's panel saving idea is dumb. Williams & Tsien made a point about saying that the experience of the building was key and that it is sad that it will no longer live on as that. Diller was right when she said that saving the facade is also a dumb idea--though the facade does capture some of the spirit of the building, it does no represent the experience itself.

I find it ironic that the "Art Bay" meaningless b.s. subtractitecture occupies much of the former folk art museum.

I wonder if people will chain themselves to the FAM like they did other monuments of the past? I see echoes of occupy wall street in this, in that the MoMA represents wall street billionaires (living in the MoMA tower, no less) and the FAM represents physical culture that has been lost.

Art Bay is like the museum equivalent of hedge fund derivatives, just a bunch of empty pyrotechnics that bankrupt real culture.